


[B]aby [T]eeth

by Negansplumbusinmyrumham



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: But Mostly Hurt, Gen, M/M, Oneshot, Other, Season 8 Spoilers, absolutely zero romance, dwight hates simon, hurt with the promise of future comfort, me venting my big season 8 feelings, simon is out of control, simons war crimes against oceanside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 05:52:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14538078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Negansplumbusinmyrumham/pseuds/Negansplumbusinmyrumham
Summary: Simon has a history of breaking some very serious rules.





	[B]aby [T]eeth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [staghag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/staghag/gifts).



> Comments are moderated due to an ongoing incident of stalking/harassment but don't let that scare you away from reviewing/criticizing, all legitimate comments favorable and unfavorable will be posted <3

~Baby Teeth

 

Carl overreacts to things fairly often- he’s fifteen, angry, all hormones and too old to cry in front of anybody so he's constantly exploding over something.  It’s how kids age get. Negan used to teach them in another life, if anything it's comforting to see some things are still like they've always been. When Carl comes at him, red-faced and squealing, he assumes it's just another mood.

 

“Was it you?  Was it you?”

 

His eyes are open so wide with rage that he looks like a cartoon, they practically stretch from his jaw to his hairline.

 

“Was it you?”

 

He nearly climbs the older man, shoving and pulling and trying pathetically to knock him over.  

 

When Negan grabs his wrists, he’s still swinging so hard that his feet come off the ground.

 

“What the shit?  ‘Fuck’s wrong with you?” 

 

It's impossible to get him to say anything else, he just repeats himself but louder when pressed for an answer.  The bandage covering his bad eye falls to rest on his cheekbone. 

 

“Am I what?” he moves his hands to the kid’s shoulders.  “Carl, what's going on?”

 

His face flickers between a child's pout and a genuinely frightening fury.  He pulls away, stomps off, but there's no reason to think that this is any different than any of his other tantrums.  

 

There's no reason for Negan to think it will be the last time he sees the kid alive.

\--  

 

Simon made people uncomfortable like it was a competitive sport.  That was half the benefit of having him around. Negan was reasonable, lenient even, the aging man responded to the show of effort more than anything.  People knew that, knew he could be talked to. Simon couldn't. 

It was too easy to send Simon into all the dirty work.  He wasn't just good at following orders; it was fun for him.  Negan figured that, growing up, the other man had been the type to spend his afternoons burning insects with a magnifying glass.  

 

He’d tried to picture what Simon might have been like before it all went bad, but never could.  It was as if he materialized in the chaos, a condensation of venum taking the shape of a human. He acted unaffected, never bought into the nostalgia, never expressed any sort of loss, his entire being seemingly composed of that sharp smile, of eyes that scanned constantly for some thread to pull, some scab to pick.  

 

He wasn't happy unless there was an active conflict.  Negan sometimes suspected that he stirred things up out of boredom.  It always played out the same way: things would be calm, peaceful, everybody falling into place and then he’d send Simon off to do some routine collection or maintainance and there would be another ‘incident’.  There was always an excuse, and some underling to back up his version of the event. He walked as close to the line as he could get without crossing it. 

 

Most recently, he’d wiped out a colony of scavengers.  When pressed, some of the younger guys conflicted Simon’s report that it had all gone down in the name of preemptive self defence.

 

“She hit him, and he said ‘Light em up’.  So we did.”

 

“Women? Kids?”

 

“He said, ‘everyone’.”

 

Simon just blew it off when he was confronted about it.

 

“They were-” he licked at the back of his teeth, unconcerned “beyond reasoning with.”

\--

 

Carl knew what he saw.  

It was a violence he’d first become familiar with while they were staying at the farm.  Shane and his Dad had brought that older boy back with them, somebody who went to school with Maggie.  He was out in the barn, and at the time, Carl naively assumed the men had rescued him.

 

Carl came to the barn a lot after Sophia died.  The twins were babyish, couldn't follow the rules of any games and Hershel’s youngest daughter was already a teenager, too old to bother with him.  Looking back at that time, he remembered feeling like the last kid alive, like he’d never have another friend. The barn was the last place Sophia was, so hanging out in there somehow felt less lonely.

 

He’d been warned a hundred times to stay away.  Shane had no reason to suspect he was being watched when he did what he did.  It was different than watching Daryl, who knocked him around and asked prying questions and drove his thumb into the bullet hole in the older boy’s leg to get an answer.  Shane came in quiet, sneaky, bolted the doors from the inside. He didn’t ask him anything. 

 

Carl knew the word “Fuck”, and was aware vaguely that it had to do with reproduction, but it’d only been a swear word until then.  He watched with a queasy fascination while Shane rutted up against the older boy. Later on, laying in bed, he would find himself paralized by the weight of this new information.  He would play out what he saw; Shane taking both of their clothes off, staccato-sharp jerks of his hips, the older boy underneath him crying. He would watch the sun come up, unblinking, trying to reconcile the brutality of the act with what little he knew about sex- that his mother and father had to have done that to make him dragged bile up into his throat.  He worried, when he heard bits of passing gossip, that Shane had been on top of his mother, grunting obscenely with his hand over her mouth like he did with the boy in the barn. He worried that Shane had hurt her, made her cry, worried that his father had ever participated in such an ugly thing. He spent nights wide awake, dreading the dawning horror that one day he might be expected to do the same to somebody.  Wasn't that what men did?

 

They never talked about it explicitly, but he knew his father had to have had some idea what Shane had been up to.  On the road between the farm and the prison, Rick sat him down and asked very seriously, “Did Shane ever… bother you?  Did he ever do anything to make you uncomfortable?”

“He tried to kill you.”

They left it at that.

  
  


He’d almost brought it up once, after the run-in with those bikers that Daryl fell in with.  It felt like things coming full circle, like some cosmic payback for what he’d seen. His father treated him so fragile for weeks after.  Rick kept wanting to talk about it, to explain things that Carl didn't need his help figuring out. 

 

Maybe it was Carl’s unwillingness to confirm his understanding of things that made Rick so bad at hiding what was happening.  Maybe part of him did want somebody to notice. 

Rick was going from the shower to his bedroom, and he must have thought he was alone in the house.  If he knew Carl could see him, he would have dressed in the bathroom like he usual instead of wrapping his middle in a towel.  But Carl did see, and immediately, he knew what it meant.

 

He knew why there were bruises on his father's shoulders.

 

\--

 

From the very beginning, Negan caught himself tallying mental marks against Dwight in the same way he once had with problem students.  He still had the number codes for the computerized comments memorized. They switched to those to keep helicopter parents from taking the criticism too personally.  That’s where his brain marked the beginning of the great deterioration.

 

  1. Finds cooperative work challenging.
  2. Deficit emotional regulation.
  3. Poor communication skills.
  4. Struggles to adjust to changes in environment.
  5. Lack of respect for ownership or property/History of theft



 

Not malicious or dangerous or defiant, nobody who needed to be put down.  He occupied a similar category as Simon; an asset if kept on a short leash.  He would have resented the comparison- if there was anybody that Dwight openly despised, it was the tall, balding sadist with the overgrown Joseph Stalin mustache.  Simon knew it, went out of his way to fuck with him in a way that Negan caught himself coping in his interactions with Rick Grimes. He stood too close, got handsier the more obvious Dwight’s attempts regain some sort of personal space became.   

 

Negan suspected that Simon might have had some alternative motives for the harassment.  As tough as the guy was, as much as he almost went out of his way to avoid socializing, he was clearly lonely.  Sometimes it would just be bored, playful bullying but there were other times when it wasn’t, so touch starved and desperate for contact that he moved like a ghost, stealing what little sparks of humanity ignited against him before Dwight became aware of his presence and shoved him off.  It all stopped soon enough, once Dwight got his face cooked. Even Sherry didn’t want him after that.

 

The first trouble with Dwight hadn’t been the  _ confiscation _ of the two hot chicks he’d shown up with.  Whatever he’d seen out on the road on his own apparently made the arrangement sound reasonable enough, at least until he got homesick for his girl.  The first trouble had been when they overtook the sanctuary from the sorry sacks who’d been squatting there earlier. Looking back, he’d killed more of his own guys than he had anybody from the group they cleared out.  At the height of it he was bashing two, three heads a day. Keeping his men from bothering the women they were evicting was harder than swatting flies away from a freshly laid pile of horst shit.

 

Simon had been the one to suggest killing the males.

“No men of their own and they’ll be happy to work with us.  They’ll need the protection.”

It made sense, and so the plan formed for Negan and Arat and even Negan’s wives (anybody they would trust) to march the women a few day’s walk to the water while Simon led the men to clean out the sanctuary under the pretence of their recruitment, then disposed of them once the area was secured.  The misdirection was supposed to make everything go smoothly.

 

Six days passed.  Dwight was looking for Negan before the group was even back inside the fence.  He looked pale and miserable and, with what would later become the burnt half of his face untouched, pretty in a delicate sort of way.  

“I’m done.” He was barely coherent, out of breath like he’d been running.

“Hmm?”  They stepped off to the side.

“I’m done.  I don’t wanna do this anymore, I don’t- what Simon did back there, I don’t want no part of it.  Whatever that means, I don’t care if you…” he motioned to Luceile with his gaze, then dropped his eyes to the dirt.  “Whatever it means. I don’t want any part in this.”

He gripped the bat threateningly, and watched the blonde’s slight shoulders slump in relief.

“So you’re saying you want to desert?”

Dwight wouldn’t look up at him.

“That’s a serious offence.  That’s- I’ll have to make an example, you know that, right?  You don’t want any time to think this over?”

“And Sherry?”

“What about her?”

The younger man’s knees shook, and he sniffled back a tear.

Negan put a hand on Dwight’s shoulder, and in that moment he saw him as a kid.  He fought the urge to hug him into his chest, sooth down his hair, tell him it would be okay.  He’d barely been more than one back then, 25 at the absolute oldest.

“Sherry’s her own woman.  With or without you, she’ll be taken care of.  She does right by me.”

“Then I-” Dwight squared his jaw. “Yeah.  I want out.”

 

It felt like the right thing to do, to investigate the situation.  Right away, multiple sources confirmed witnessing the same act of inhumanity, inconsistency in reports of time and location suggesting that this had possibly happened more than once.

At some point, a baby started crying.  Simon threw it at a wall: Well, some said ‘threw’, but there were also versions where he snatched it by the leg and swung it.  Other accounts reported him standing boys in a line to strangle with his bare hands, and compiling them in pits to push their fathers into when they woke back up as roamers.  Those were backed up by the mass graves behind the building (“We’ll line the fence with them to hold back outsiders” he explained).

 

He got offended when Negan suggested, sternly but patiently, that it would have been better to find some more humane to exterminate them.  Simon took it in stride until Negan said, “-and the babies. Some of those boys were… they weren’t a threat to anybody.”

Simon laughed at him, a cruel barking sound with no humor behind it.

“No. No threat at all.  Not like any of us want to live more than five, ten years anyway.”

“I’m just saying-”

“Saying your dick’s gone too limp to make the hard calls.  You know what boys do? Boys like that? They grow up, they grow up mad and mean and the second they’re big enough to hold a pistol they come for you.  They don’t stay little forever, they-” his face twisted into a sharp smile, amused by joke he hadn’t yet told. “Well, I guess those ones do stay little forever, now.  Fuck it. You get what I’m saying. You’re welcome.”

 

Moving them from the pit to the fence, the macably preserved youth of the ones toward the bottom had half of his men scampering off to find some other chore.  Some were like larva, they wiggled and cried out raspy imitations of human infancy and to hold one for more than a minute, it was easy to forget it wasn’t a living kid.  Other than the cold, the stench, the small ones kicked and protested and it was easy to pretend that they were just fussy, just cranky. The smallest ones all had a clear point of impact, an area of softness where what ever blunt trauma  _ -“He was throwing them at walls.”- _ had ended their lives had left an imprint.  The grown men were littered in bullet holes. Then there were the boys, from just before puberty to early adulthood.  They had no obvious marks- scratches and bruises but no gashes, no holes.

There was no getting a straight answer from Simon other than a bored, annoyed insistence that only the big ones were really worth wasting a bullet on.  Dwight was similarly tight-lipped, refused to talk about what he saw other than to repeat that he wanted out, that he couldn’t work with a psychopath like Simon, that he couldn’t live among men who had no decency.  It took a few more days of unloading before he noticed the discoloration at their necks.

 

He got his answers from Bud, middle-aged and rankless and constantly looking over his shoulder as he spoke.

“Simon… picked some of them.  He took them into the woods, Dave stood watch.  He was back there almost two days, then him and Dave dragged out fifteen or twenty kids with their necks snapped.  I think he was doing them one at a time and like- you know. Made the others watch ‘til it was their turn. Lotta screaming.  Felt a little unnecessary.”

When he confronted Dwight with what he’d learned, the man actually started crying.  

“I think he-  I think something really bad was going on.  I can’t do this. I don’t care if you have to kill me, I can’t be part of what he was doing out there.”

 

When the pits were cleaned out, the bottom sparkled with what looked like tiny seashells at a sandbar.  Some had been so small that they’d been biting with little milk-mouths. In their absence glistened hundreds of baby teeth.

\--

 

The first time Rick knew he would be short on supplies, he spent the days before the pickup a frantic, vomiting mess.  Somebody was going to die. Somebody who he loved, who trusted him, was going to die. He scrounged from houses and old cabinets, things nobody would want- dental floss and canned figs and nail polish, anything to pad out the month’s deficit.  

 

He would be sickened to remember that, when Negan failed to accompany his men for the pickup, he was relieved.  He’d only dealt with Simon twice, once on the road and once on that horrible night that Glenn was murdered. He assumed it was that memory that made him uneasy around the other man, who like Negan was all reasonable smiles and understanding nods as Rick explained how the better part of their reserves had been lost in a fire; they would catch up, of course they would, just needed some more time.

 

Alone in the supply room, Simon grinned at the bare shelves.  He ran his fingers over the built up dust. He came up behind Rick, like he liked to do to Dwight, and hooked a thumb in each on his jean pockets.  Rick’s voice sped up, urgent, promising that they would make up for it when Daryl and Jesus got back from their hunt.

He felt the handlebar mustache brush against the shell of his ear.

“Shh- hey, don’t worry ‘bout that right now.”

“We can make it up, we’ll have double by the next pickup, just tell Negan-”

“Negan knows, baby.”  His hands slid down to Rick’s thighs. “We’re all Negan, remember?”  He pressed the smaller man closer.

“We- we’ll make up the difference.” Rick assured him, pulling away a little only to feel the stiffness of an erection jabbing into his back.

“Yeah, you will,” greedy hands moved under his shirt to consume him, ripping the buttons from inside.  “Gonna make up the difference right now.”

\--

 

Negan came rushing to Alexandria when he heard Carl was sick.  By the time he got there, the boy was soaked in sweat and green-skinned.  The teenager who had once been so fierce and defiance was now fragile and infantile.  He’d been fitted with a diaper, too weak to even sit up when he had to use the bathroom.  His eyes fluttered and he showed some awareness of the older man, reached out to him with clammy, pruney fingers.  Negan took them in his own hand- the bones felt like twigs.

The last words he said were, “Please, please make it stop.”

 

He stood outside on the porch while everybody said their goodbyes.  In a way, it was nice, reminded him of children’s books where little girls died of scarlet fever with everybody they loved around them.  Where cancer patients passed in hospitals, somebody holding their hand. So much nicer than what death was now, that sudden violent thing leaving no room for a boy to be held in his father’s arms as he passed.

 

Michonne was the one to approach him about the deed.  Rick looked away into the night sky, pale and tragic and she held him before nodding to Negan to go on inside.  There was nothing left of the kid. White-eyed and snarling. He sat beside the now-restrained teenager, moved a lock of hair out of his eyes, kissed his cooling forehead.  He held Carl’s hand when he pulled the trigger, and heard his father wail in response to the sound. When he is sure that nobody is coming in he quietly, cautiously lifts the boy’s shirt to expose the bandaged wound.  It moves away easily. The wound is razor-straight, impossible to come from a bite. He think he is starting to piece something together, all these wrong things match somewhere at the edges.

 

\--

 

Everything falls into place in the store room.  Simon has Rick against the wall, sucking and nipping along his jaw, one hand holding him still by the hip and the other working around front of him.  Simon didn’t notice him come in, lost in the bliss of conquering the beautiful sheriff. The tall man was whispering in his victim's ear.

“Know better now, don’t ‘cha?”  He groaned. “Know I can take away every last thing you got.  Think you could send that little brat to tell about us? Trashy, real trashy baby, you don’t kiss and tell.”

Rick only responded with pained, cut-off noises, which encouraged Simon to pick up his pace.  “You’re mine. You’re mine and I can take away everything from you.”

Rick, between breaths that skipped like a scratched record, whimpered “You already have.”

Simon laughed. “Don’t sell yourself short, baby.  Still got that nice piece of dark chocolate keeping your bed warm, yeah?  Still got that pretty little girl, too.” He didn’t stop pumping, matched the rhythm of Rick’s cracking breaths.  “She know how to spell her name yet? Maybe when I get sick of you, I’ll-”

 

It was all Negan could stand to hear.  The barbs on Lucile’s body tore a strip of scalp away as if it had been a toupee.  The second blow wiped the look of shock off his face to something grotesque, almost comical, no expression that matched any emotion.  His actual brains came out on the third.

 

He expected Rick to look relieved, thankful, like somebody who had just been rescued.  Instead, there was only shame. He leaned against the wall of the supply building and sobbed as if the other man wasn’t there.  Negan felt tears well up in his own eyes; nothing to do with Rick or Carl or his now-dead lieutenant. No, those passed for normal.  He for what was buried like a trove of filthy secretes out behind the sanctuary. He cried for all those baby teeth.


End file.
